Original painting of a Dublin street scene, mixed media on watercolour paper. by

Sometimes you have a particular idea for a painting/drawing/illustration, you plan it out fairly carefully and start painting, Then you get to a point where you have something that doesn’t look much like your ‘vision’ and actually looks fairly shite. You know you should keep going, even if the resulting painting might not be great or even good, at least it will be a learning experience. So you keep going and it’s fairly soul destroying and draining for awhile. Eventually you start to feel it come together and you end up enthusiastic to proceed to the finish. This mostly happens when your trying something new, a bit different from what you’ve done before.

This painting is a typical example, the first pic is where I nearly gave up, and the final painting is a fairly decent representation of my original idea.
My aim was to do s nighttime painting of downtown Dublin with a much more simple approach than I normally take. I also tried breaking a typical rule of composition by putting the subject, the guy using a vaping, smack in the middle of the picture. Normally I would follow the rule of thirds.

The vibe I’m going for here is the kind of empty fullness I often walking around the slightly dystopian looking centre of Dublin at night. It sort of reminds me of 80’s movies  like Blade Runner and Robocop. Those movie predictions are becoming increasingly true.
My original intention was to make the painting even simpler, almost abstract, this looks more inspired by animation and comics more than I intended but I’m fine with it.

The location is under Loopline bridge with Liberty Hall and the entrance to Old Abbey Street on the left.

It’s a real mixed media job with a combination acrylic, watercolour, gouache, Indian ink and colour pencils, 39cm x 26cm on heavy, cold press, watercolour paper.